Geraldo Jive
Fox’s man in Afghanistan.

By John J. Miller, NR national political reporter
January 3, 2001, 12:20 p.m.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This appeared in the Sept. 1 1998, issue of NR.

n the day Monica Lewinsky's lawyers announced their client's immunity deal with Kenneth Starr, Geraldo Rivera demonstrated once again why he's the White House's favorite media personality. At the start of his nightly CNBC legal-affairs show Rivera Live, he played a clip of President Clinton's black limousine driving up Pennsylvania Avenue after a tribute to the two slain Capitol Police officers. "As [Clinton] left the solemn ceremony at the Capitol, which dealt with bravery and heroism and sacrifice, his motorcade passed the very courthouse where Ken Starr has been obsessed with sex, sex lies, and audiotapes,'' said Rivera in a voice-over.

This short scene from the Clinton - Lewinsky immorality play was unadulterated White House agitprop: a good president trying to do his job while an independent counsel hounds him relentlessly. Rivera has said that "history will recognize [Clinton] as a great man.'' Starr, on the other hand, is "crude,'' "absolutely shameless,'' and "increasingly irrational.'' On June 30, Rivera labeled the independent counsel "unpatriotic'' for taking Linda Tripp's testimony while Clinton traveled in China. "They say Ken Starr has no sense of public relations, and that he's constantly shooting himself in the foot,'' he said. "I think today he shot us all in the heart.'' Sniff, sniff.

Rivera Live has become the major venue for discussion of Clinton's zipper problem, partly because no other program covers all its salacious twists in such detail and partly because of Rivera's anxious partisanship. Since the intern portion of the scandal erupted in January, nobody has defended the White House more vigorously than the one-time trash-TV host. Rivera fancies himself a reporter, but he's really just a repeater: night after night, he faithfully follows the administration's line on the scandal topic du jour. His program lays bare the moral calculus of Clinton's defenders, although most of them don't state it so forthrightly.

Rivera does not actually think the president is innocent of wrongdoing: "We all suspect — everyone watching this program probably suspects that something happened'' between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, he declared on July 23. But, in Geraldo's mind, no president ought to get in trouble for indulging a natural instinct. A few minutes after Rivera aired his suspicions about Clinton's intern policies, for example, a guest on his show mentioned that White House press secretary Mike McCurry has a tough job defending the indefensible. A quizzical look appeared on Rivera's face. "Never told a sex lie?'' he asked.

To the 55-year-old owner of America's most famous mustache, sex lies are a different kind of dishonesty, and perhaps not a problem at all. "What man is not going to lie about it?'' he asked on July 14. These are the 1990s! When the Heritage Foundation's Todd Gaziano appeared on the program and said that perjury used to be considered a much more serious crime than it is today, Rivera snapped back: "And they used to paint a great big A on you when you cheated on your wife.''

If they still did, Rivera would look like a body painting by now. In his 1991 autobiography, Exposing Myself, he brags at wearying length about the many women he has bedded and the lies he has told to cover up his affairs: "I was like a junkie when it came to women, an alcoholic, and even my best intentions were not enough to keep me faithful for long.'' By his own account, he is a pathological womanizer. "I've had thousands of women, literally thousands,'' he told Playboy in 1989. "Figure it out for yourself. If you had a different woman every couple of days, and you do it for some years running, it just adds up.''

It also distorts moral sensibility. Rivera's memoirs contain one of the most deeply confused sentences ever to appear in print: "My marriage was important to me, and so I made sure my outside encounters never became more than one-night stands.'' He wrote that about his third marriage; he's currently on wife number four.

Rivera's career is at its height today. Always hungry for respect from the establishment media, he started to draw renewed attention with his aggressive coverage of the O. J. Simpson trials. He took the side of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and made Rivera Live one of the most-watched programs on cable television. It was the only hit on CNBC's prime-time lineup, inspiring the channel's parent company, NBC, to counter Fox News's serious bid for Rivera by signing him to a six-year deal worth more than $30 million (second only to Tom Brokaw at NBC News). In addition to the legal-affairs show, Rivera will host Upfront Tonight, a CNBC nightly news program that debuts August 24; he will also star in four prime-time specials for NBC News each year and make special appearances on the Today show. All this permits him to dump his decade-old talk show, Geraldo!; ratings had slipped in recent years, and this pioneer of daytime deviance had refused to stoop to the new lows reached by Jerry Springer and Co.

As part of his new arrangement with NBC, Rivera covered Clinton's trip to China and displayed the same pro-Clinton bias that has marked Rivera Live. When a TV Guide reporter asked Mike McCurry how Rivera won access to the president in China when other reporters did not, McCurry replied: "When it comes to scandal stuff, Geraldo has been as open-minded as you would want a journalist to be. We notice things like that.''

Before his Clinton-inspired eminence, Rivera had become best known for a series of weird professional mishaps. In 1986, for instance, he hosted a highly rated live two-hour special to investigate the contents of what was allegedly Al Capone's hidden vault; it turned out to be empty. Two years later another fiasco raised him to new heights of celebrity, but not necessarily the kind he wanted. During a fight on his daytime show in 1988, one guest threw a chair at Rivera and broke his nose. Suddenly Geraldo had reached the level at which a person is known instantly and everywhere by his first name, like Newt or Ahh-nold. He grumbled about not being taken seriously, but before long he was pulling some new stunt like having body fat extracted from his rear end and injected into his forehead. He did that in 1992.

Geraldo wasn't actually born Geraldo; he was given the name Gerald by his Jewish mother and Puerto Rican father. When he was growing up, everybody called him Gerry. After graduating from Brooklyn Law School, he became a small-time lawyer representing a hard-left Puerto Rican activist group known as the Young Lords. They displayed pictures of Castro, Lenin, and Marx in their office, and Rivera frequently made television appearances on their behalf. Al Primo, the news director at WABC, was then looking to hire a Puerto Rican reporter for Eyewitness News. He spotted Rivera on an evening broadcast and invited him for an interview. They quickly came to terms. Just as Rivera was getting ready to leave, Primo asked, "By the way, what's Gerry short for?''

"Gerald.''

"Gerald? It's not very Puerto Rican, is it?''

"No,'' said Rivera, who then suggested the stage name Geraldo.

Primo tested the sound of it — Geraldo Rivera, with a G that sounds like an H and three rolling R's. "That's better,'' he said. "Let's go with Geraldo.''

The decision gave birth to a persistent rumor that Rivera's surname is actually Rivers. (That rumor is false. It is true, however, that in high school and college he would occasionally spell his last name Riviera.) Rivera hates it when people ask him about this story. Sometimes he will overcompensate in trying to bolster his ethnic image. When he invited Jorge Amselle of the Center for Equal Opportunity onto his show in 1996 to discuss a Supreme Court decision on language, he seemed astonished that anybody with the name Jorge could support official-English laws. "C'mon, don't you eat rice and beans, man?'' he blurted at Amselle, who grew up in Latin America.

At WABC, Rivera tomcatted recklessly. By the early 1970s he had been involved in scores of liaisons and had financed at least two abortions for women he had impregnated. The fact that he was married to his second wife (Edie Vonnegut, daughter of Kurt) for much of this period didn't slow him down. "It was common for women working for me in those days to wind up in my bed. It was like a part of the job description,'' he wrote in his autobiography.

The Clintonesque parallels are almost eerie. In 1972, Rivera began a long-term affair with Marian Javits, wife of liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits. One of their encounters occurred on a day when Henry Kissinger was scheduled to have dinner at the Javitses' home. The Secret Service scoured the place beforehand, but as Rivera reports in Exposing Myself, Marian "wasn't the type to let a small thing like the Secret Service get in the way of romance.'' To evade the agents, they slipped into the Javitses' mirrored bathroom for what Rivera calls "one of the most thrilling sexual experiences I've ever had.'' That evening, as Rivera sat across the table from Kissinger, he wondered what the Secret Service had revealed to President Nixon's Secretary of State: "I felt sure he knew what went on there that afternoon — the Secret Service was in the next room, combing the apartment, how could he not know? — and the thought of his knowing made the memory even more improperly delicious.''

Even though he was a working journalist, Rivera actively supported George McGovern for president in 1972. "The campaign seemed almost a holy crusade,'' he wrote. He stumped so vocally, in fact, that WABC had to suspend him from Eyewitness News until after the election. The incident did not stop Rivera's steady rise. In 1976, he attended an event for Jimmy Carter and suffered no consequences. Soon enough, he was hosting a late-night chat show, and in 1978 he was hired by ABC News for 20/20. Rivera became one of the network's star correspondents, and his cavorting reached new levels. As his third wife rested in a hospital bed after delivering his first child, the wayward Geraldo rang up two old flames: "Our lovemaking was a personal celebration for me,'' he recalls.

In 1985, Rivera protested a management decision to spike another reporter's story. As the tension mounted, his personal assistant (whom he later married) was caught using an ABC courier to buy marijuana, allegedly for a friend. Rivera was quickly canned. Only now is he regaining the mainstream respectability he lost at that moment.

His brand of advocacy journalism may yet win it all back, or at least earn him sufficient ratings to sustain his rantings. Rivera still dreams about being a network anchor. That's clearly out of his reach now, but he has already grasped another career goal; writing of his days as a cub reporter in New York, Rivera says: "My position at Eyewitness News could not shake me from my activist roots, but it could (and should have, and finally did) reshape the manner and method of my activism.'' Today, Rivera's activism allows him to man the barricades for the president of the United States. And after more than six months of on-the-air debate and a lifetime of experimentation, he has come up with what may turn out to be President Clinton's best defense against Ken Starr: "Never told a sex lie?''